


plant gardens (and eat the fruit of them)

by melthedestroyer



Series: Stand aside, and breathe in the new life [2]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Afterlife, Canonical Character Death, Fix-It, M/M, Mosaic Timeline (The Magicians: A Life in the Day), Post-Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 02:08:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29056437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melthedestroyer/pseuds/melthedestroyer
Summary: Eliot dies an old man after a lifetime of working on the mosaic, and spends his afterlife somewhere beyond the Underworld, waiting for Quentin to join him.But when Quentin finally arrives, it's not quite who he expects.(Companion to"And Expected End")
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Series: Stand aside, and breathe in the new life [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2131692
Comments: 21
Kudos: 114





	plant gardens (and eat the fruit of them)

**Author's Note:**

> So. "An Expected End" was supposed to be a oneshot. Unfortunately, Old Man Eliot had other ideas.
> 
> It's not so much a sequel as a companion piece to "An Expected End", but it would make the most sense to read that one before this one, if you haven't already.
> 
> Warnings for the canon-typical discussions of suicidal tendencies and afterlife stuff, but like the other one, this is definitely a happy story.
> 
> Thanks to [Rubick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rubick/) for the beta! And to [PanBoleyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PanBoleyn/) for planting the seed of Pissed Off Old Man Eliot in my head.

_He’s gone to meet the architects_ _  
_ _Of the only world he knew_ _  
_ _And he’s lonesome_

If you’d told Eliot in his younger days that he’d spend his afterlife gardening, he would have been disgusted. Insulted, even. It would have been proof positive he’d been sent to Hell, as his pastor said he would when he was fifteen and more careless with his secrets.

Five decades of feeding his family has changed his perspective on it. Five decades of patience and slow work on a puzzle, and the herbs and tubers and fruits that began to grow around it. It was rewarding like any creative work Eliot could do with his hands. Magic, sewing, cocktail making, fixing his hair (when that was a thing he cared about). Cooking something that came from the dirt he worked in, something his son would thoughtlessly grab second helpings of, that would make Quentin pause as he came in from outside and go “That smells _amazing_ , what’re you making?” even if it was just rabbit stew with turnips in it, without even any rosemary to elevate it.

It’s rewarding.

And so gardening, and making, became his reward.

Eliot was tentatively glad to bypass the in-between space of the Underworld and go Onward. He’d been a lifelong coward, and it was not an easy choice, but he knew in his bones that Quentin, when it was his time, would follow. Who the hell would want to spend interminable years on what amounted to a shit-tier cruise ship, crowded with strangers doing mediocre activities to pass eternity, and constantly being told he’s _supposed_ to be having a good time? _That_ would have been Quentin’s hell.

He’d have liked to say goodbye to Margo, though. Still, after all these years, though she was no longer more than a few-year blip in his long life—more than a blip: a flare, a firework. Fleeting, but bright, dangerous, beautiful.

It’s not a real garden, obviously, no more than his house is a real house or the trees surrounding it a real forest. But there’s a purpose in it, he’s not on his metaphorical hands and knees for all eternity just for something to do. The young Librarian who had escorted him through the “fast track”, as it were, hadn’t known what went on beyond the door, just that he had a job to do there. Orders from Hades, which…

Eliot thought that death would mean rest, at the very least, but he learned long ago that being idle was not as satisfying as he’d hoped.

And it would be lonely, except Heaven (or the closest thing to Eliot’s conception of it) is a vast woodland, filled with other pockets of eternity. He is not spending his afterlife alone until Quentin comes to join him.

Eliot has neighbors. People that the Universe (or whatever) felt it needed to put together, if not in life, then in death.

They all have their theories about the job they have to do—they were all given one, to create and help things grow, and no one knows for sure. But it’s nice to have a little mystery.

Arielle comes for dinner sometimes, to hear stories about her boys and the grandkids, and reminisce. She lives with a childhood best friend she hadn’t seen since she was fifteen, and looks as young as the day she died. 

Eliot looks how he feels, apparently: a healthy forty-ish, rakishly handsome of course, with only a touch of gray in his hair, and no knee problems. This is true for everyone in their little neighborhood, and Eliot is most delighted by Ethel Steinberg (an Earth woman who had been Queen of Fillory before the arrival of the Chatwins, who had the sense to abdicate at thirty, become a newspaper reporter, and blow through five and a half husbands), who lives in a little house a few clearings away and looks about eighty, and will tell anyone who listens that eighty was when she was at her “foxiest”. 

So while Eliot is bent at his work, and hears someone come up behind him, he thinks it’s one of his neighbors come to visit. 

“Just a sec,” he says, pulling out the last weed from the patch, and sits back on his heels.

Before he can turn around, he hears, “...Eliot?” A soft voice, a familiar one, but younger than he’s heard in a long time.

He whips around, scrambling to his feet. “Q?”

There’s his boy—young, _impossibly_ young, pre-fatherhood young, with hair so short it fluffs out at the bangs in a way Eliot’s never seen, wearing the shapeless Earth clothes he was wont to wear at Brakebills.

Eliot’s running to him before he’s fully absorbed it all, and takes him in his arms, picking him up and spinning for joy. Quentin yelps and clings to him, which is just fine with Eliot. He hadn’t been able to lift anything heavier than a walking stick in the last few years he was alive—Quentin being able to hold onto him is just one of the many blessings of his current afterlife.

He sets Quentin down and kisses him hello, thoroughly, and feels him gasp into it.

“I knew you’d follow when it was time,” Eliot whispers, keeping their foreheads together. “Hello, darling.”

“...Eliot?” Quentin asks, sounding shaky, almost afraid. 

That won’t do at all. Eliot pulls back and cups his face. So _young_ , that face—from long before laugh lines and a penchant for ridiculous beards. Does Quentin truly feel that _this_ was when he was at his best? Quentin had been beautiful in his twenties, but the confidence of his early middle age far outpaced that, and his joy in being a grandfather and an old eccentric in the woods outdid perhaps even _that_. Beards aside.

Eliot strokes his thumb over the smooth planes of his face. “It’s me,” he confirms. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“It’s...I…” Quentin pulls back with a confused, sad frown. “What are you doing here?”

That throws him. “Um...Gardening? Whiling away the afterlife?”

Quentin shakes his head. “But...but Eliot, you’re _alive_ , I _saw_ you, I— You outlived me, you had to have… Eliot, tell me you survived.” He takes Eliot by the elbows, holding tight, looking up at him with wide and pleading eyes. “Tell me it wasn’t for nothing.”

Something is very wrong. It eats at the edge of Eliot’s mind, and he can’t quite grasp it, but whatever it is makes him feel immeasurably sad. In a way he hasn’t since he first died and realized he might not ever see his family again. 

“Darling, I...didn’t outlive you,” he says gently, not a little confused, resting his hands on Quentin’s arms. “You were working on the puzzle, and I fell asleep in my chair, and...woke up in the Underworld. You were alive, last I saw you. What’s going on?”

Quentin’s eyes widen, and instead of the realization he was hoping for, there’s just more fear there. “...What?”

“I mean, I was seventy-seven with Fillorian healthcare, sweetheart, it was bound to happen. Don’t look so upset.” He pulls Quentin close again. He could always calm Quentin by tucking him under his chin. He would come grudgingly half the time, being an absolute brat and making a show of merely _tolerating_ it, but Eliot could always feel how his heart would slow, how his breathing would even out when kept close like that. “It turned out alright for me. The important question is, did you solve the damn thing?”

Quentin’s arms slowly wrap around Eliot’s waist—an improvement, though he still seems to not quite know what to do with himself. “Solve what?”

“The _mosaic_ , my love. Good grief, what do you think? You can’t tell me we spent the rest of our lives in Fillory only to not get the key and save all of magic.”

“The—oh my god.” Quentin pulls back and looks up at him. “Oh my God. Eliot are— You said you died in your chair? In your seventies? While I was…”

“Working on the puzzle, yes. My knees were for shit by that point.”

“Oh my god…” Quentin covers his mouth with his hand and backs away. “This can’t—what the fuck. What the _fuck_.” He looks around, desperate, taking in the home that Eliot has been building for him. “Eliot, I’m...I’m not—that person, I’m...I mean, I am, sort of, but not—not the way you think—oh my god…”

Eliot can see the panic coming from a mile away more than he can make sense of the words being said, and wants to rail against whatever deity was still in charge that even in the afterlife, this poor man isn’t safe from his own brain. It’s enough to postpone the slowly seeping dread he feels having heard _I’m not that person_. 

“Okay, alright, slow down,” he says, stepping forward again to take him by the shoulders. He presses gently against his shoulder blades with his fingertips, subtly straightening Quentin’s back so he can get deeper breaths in. “Why don’t you come inside, I’ll make us some tea, and you tell me what’s going on, because clearly something doesn’t line up, and we’re going to figure it out.”

“Yeah,” Quentin sighs, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Yeah, okay.”

Eliot leads him inside.

It’s not an exact replica of their home. More...their home as Eliot would have had it, without the limitations of Fillorian technology and an incomplete magical education. Bigger, for one thing, with a darker, richer wood. A proper bedroom, too, instead of a bed in the corner of the main room and an outside cot, though sleep was an indulgence instead of a necessity these days.

Eliot sits Quentin at the table and fusses about the kitchen to make some tea.

“So,” he says, having put the kettle on and blending some dried herbs together with a mortar and pestle. “Why don’t you start from the beginning?”

Quentin folds himself into the chair with the same awkwardness of his youth: slightly sideways, one leg tucked under his chin.

“Well, for starters, I’m not a seventy-something-year-old dude who died in Fillory working on the mosaic,” Quentin mumbles.

Eliot has to pause for a moment, absorb the reality of it. Close his eyes against the ache in his chest where he misses his husband the most, let himself feel it, and then let it pass through him on an exhale. _A_ Quentin has come to join him, but not _his_ Quentin.

“I see.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be,” Eliot sighs through his sadness, resuming his work. “Clearly whatever’s happened isn’t your fault.”

“Sort of. Um…”

Quentin stalls, so Eliot brings his bowl of herbs to the table, sitting across from him. “So you’re not the Quentin I know. But you know of the mosaic?”

“Yeah, um.” Quentin squeezes his eyes shut and swallows.

And Eliot gets the story. Margo with the key, peaches and plums in a basket in the throne room, remembering their life, the rest of the quest, and Blackspire, and—

“Wait hold on. Back up a moment.”

Quentin looks up at him, with those— _eyes_ , Jesus. They look pleading, but Eliot doesn’t know what exactly for.

“So...you solved the mosaic?”

“Yeah, I...sort of. We got the key.”

“How.”

Quentin shuts his eyes and leans his forehead on his knee. “After you died. I...I was digging a grave for you, and in the ground there was a gold tile. I put it in the center of the mosaic, and...there was the key. I gave it to Jane Chatwin, and it got back to Margo, who sort of retroactively prevented us from going back at all.”

“A gold tile,” Eliot echoes. “So...it wasn’t a pattern at all.”

“Yeah, no, it was a fucking metaphor.”

“That would’ve saved me a lot of back problems,” Eliot says, lightly as he can, and gets up to grab the tea kettle as it starts to whistle.

“I think that was kind of the point.”

“A time key...I suppose it wanted time,” Eliot says, shrugging. “A labor of love, anyway. I don’t regret it.” He fixes their tea, and it takes a moment to realize Quentin’s silence is more than just pensive.

He turns around. Quentin’s frowning at his palms. “Yeah,” he says at last, very, very softly. “I guess.”

Eliot brings their tea to the table and takes Quentin’s hands. “I don’t,” Eliot says. “You gave me a beautiful life, Quentin. I’d do it all again.”

Quentin swallows and takes his hands away. “It wasn’t us, El. It was—I don’t regret it either, I don’t. The memories I have of it, they’re so important to me, but. It wasn’t...We were thrown together. I know you wouldn’t have chosen that, given. Y’know. Options.”

Eliot’s hands go cold. His feet, his stomach.

He sits.

“Quentin,” he says, as evenly as he can. “I need you to be honest with me.”

“Mhm?” Quentin mumbles, mostly to his knee.

“What the high holy fuck did I say to you?”

“What?” he looks up, all puppy eyes, confused.

“After you remembered,” Eliot elaborates, as patiently as he can. “What...what did I say. To you. To make you think that.”

“El, it’s not—you were _right_ , is the thing—”

“Quentin, I was a twenty-five-year-old shitshow who had only just laid off popping benzos like breath mints,” Eliot cuts in, with more heat than he’d intended. “I seriously doubt I was right about a single fucking thing back then. Be honest with me. What did I say to you.”

“You…” Quentin swallows. “Basically _that_ , honestly. I sort of...proposed maybe trying it out, and you said that it wasn’t us, not when we have a choice. So...we just kinda moved on with it.”

Eliot sighs, rubbing his eyes. Every doubt, every little niggling insecurity that had haunted his entire marriage, that had whispered _he’s only with you because he’s stuck with you_ ; those had softened with time, only cropping up in especially dark moments. He still doesn’t fully understand what it was Quentin saw in him, and wishes every day he could have given him more, been a better husband, but he also died knowing that, for whatever reason, Quentin loved him. 

His younger self, even having seen that life play out with his own eyes...that young man _would_ have been frightened. He didn’t know, back then, _how_ to be loved. All he would have seen was an opportunity to set himself—and Quentin—up for heartbreak, when he inevitably fell short of the mark.

Swallowing, wishing dearly he could take that young man he used to be and _shake_ him, Eliot opens his eyes. “Well, that certainly sounds like me. Quentin?”

“Yeah?”

“You know I was a liar and a coward, right? You—you _have_ to have known that.”

“You’re not a _coward_ , El, you—”

“Like hell I wasn’t,” Eliot snaps. “I know _exactly_ the kind of person I was when I was twenty-five, Quentin. I was terrified, of—of fucking things up, I suppose, and I _would’ve_ run the hell away, convinced you could do so much better.” He sighs. “Which you could, but. You know. That’s not how those things work.”

Quentin says nothing for a while, just hugging his knee and breathing.

“I’m sorry,” Eliot says, softening. “You just...You’ve got to know that. Even then, I was...I was _very_ in love with you." Eliot laughs, remembering the hopeless crushing he'd tried so hard to ignore. "Without a clue about how to deal with it.”

Quentin, surprisingly, chuckles. “Yeah, I know.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“I mean…” Quentin looks up, smiling crookedly. “I knew there was _something_. I just figured it was sort of...in spite of everything you wanted out of life, you know? I wasn’t gonna get in the way of that. The mosaic was...it was safe.”

“I didn’t want _anything_ out of life at that point, darling,” Eliot says. “I was just taking what it gave me.”

“So we’re both idiots, then,” Quentin says.

“We knew that.”

Quentin sighs, almost fondly, and nods.

“So. I turn tail and run, the Quest is finished, you’re at Blackspire…”

Quentin tells him the rest. Blackspire, the Monster, the McAllisters, magical witsec, being...fuck, _brutalized_ , worn down, by the thing in Eliot’s body. Trying to keep him alive. Margo and her axes. The mirror realm.

“And, y’know, I got them both into the Seam, but Everett was there, and I didn’t make it out.” He shrugs, an abrupt _the end_ to the story. “And now I’m here.”

Eliot swallows. “No.”

“What?”

“No. No that can’t...Quentin, are you telling me you died at twenty-six?”

“I—yeah. I had to get the mirror fixed and the Seam back open, so I mended it, and it sort of—Magic goes haywire, in the mirror realm? And it took me and Everett out with it. But I got the last bottle out in time. So I kind of...had to, I guess.”

“No you fucking well did not,” Eliot says, surprising himself with the force of it, the volume. “You did _not_ , _nothing_ is worth—” He’s up again before realizing it, holding Quentin tight to his chest with everything he has, pressing his lips to the top of his head. “ _Nothing_ , do you understand me?”

Slowly, Quentin’s arms come up to wrap around his waist. “I had to,” he says again, softly. “That thing was killing you, El. It would have been even worse if Everett got hold of it.”

“I don’t give a _fuck_ ,” Eliot grits out, practically shaking him. “We would have figured something out. _Jesus,_ Quentin." Without thinking, he threads his fingers through Quentin's hair, just to keep him as close as possible. 

The mere concept of losing him that young...it would have destroyed Eliot. And he's all the more grateful for the life he _did_ have, if his other self is out there somewhere, recovering from possession and being told his best friend is dead. There were nights...weeks, even, when they were younger, when Quentin's brain was doing a number on him, and Eliot lived in terror for the morning he might find Quentin having gone from their bed and done something—it didn't bear thinking about. Hard and scary as those times were, Quentin never so much as hurt himself, though sometimes it took Eliot staying up all night to hold him during the worst of it, telling him how much he was loved, and needed.

And somewhere in the future, Eliot would lie to Quentin's face. Tell him that it was all...nothing. That the Quentin who became a devoted husband and father, who lived a life got to grow old—and who Eliot loved thoroughly, completely, every goddamn infuriating inch of him—wasn’t real. And that the Eliot who loved him did not exist. Not when they had a choice.

"It wasn't on purpose," Quentin says, soft, trembling, into Eliot's chest. "It wasn't, I swear. I just…" His voice breaks, and Eliot's heart breaks with it. "I was so _tired,_ El, I couldn't fight anymore, I couldn't let more people die…" 

"I know, baby, I know…" Eliot whispers into Quentin's hair, rocking them both as he continues to breathe shakily. "Shh...I know. You were so brave, darling. I can’t imagine what that must’ve been like. Shh…"

Eliot thinks, for the first time in many, many years, of Margo. In full High Queen regalia, looking at him with one big, Bambi eye (the other obscured by a grand brocade eyepatch). Her voice, low, forceful and terrified, telling him _when it's 'be brave', or 'be smart'...you know which one, okay?_

He wishes Margo had been there to tell Quentin the same thing. Quentin had always been the braver of the two of them, though they both made their share of dumb decisions.

He swallows, tears stinging the back of his eyes as he sways gently, until Quentin’s breathing calms. When he pulls back, he’s a little surprised to see that Quentin hasn’t been crying. He looks too exhausted to cry. 

Eliot holds Quentin’s face in his hands, thumbs brushing his cheekbones, under eyes that would never know laugh lines, and a thought occurs to him.

“Did he see you—your Eliot? Before you went to the Mirror Realm?”

“Uhm.” Quentin swallows, looking uncomfortable enough that Eliot takes his hands away. This Quentin clearly isn’t used to the sort of affection that Eliot can’t help but give. “Maybe? You were—he woke up, but only for a minute, when the Monster left him, but we were scrambling to trap it. And I think he was in surgery when I went, but...I saw him, after. Penny showed me the funeral.”

“Jesus,” Eliot breathes.

“And he was okay. Having trouble walking, I think, but like. Dressed up, holding hands with Margo. Y’know…” Quentin smiles up at him, the ghost of one dimple appearing. “Back to normal.”

Eliot sighs, and sits down. That _had_ been his normal at one point, hadn’t it? A good vest and tie, and Margo at his side. He can hardly fathom it now. Self pity is something he’s mostly grown out of, but he pities that young man, who wore clothes like armor, whose whole world was his Bambi until they both had to grow up. Who still needed her to hold him up when the man he loved died to save him. “Back to normal” might be pushing it to say the least.

“Hey, um…” Quentin says, softly enough that Eliot realizes he’s trying to be comforting. “Everyone was, like... It was a bonfire? And everyone sang and put something in the fire? Just small things. And...you put in a peach. So.” Eliot looks up in time to see him shrug. “I don’t really know _what_ that meant to him, exactly, but. It means something.”

Eliot closes his eyes. He can see it, practically. It’s been decades, but he can imagine sitting by a fire, with Margo and all their friends from his old life, young and brokenhearted, holding a peach to give to a fire. Eliot is lucky, _so_ lucky, to have mostly escaped feeling grief like that in this life—with the notable exception of the mother of their son—and he knows that a younger version of himself would have scrambled at any opportunity to not feel that pain.

...Any opportunity.

“Quentin, you got here by that special division of the Library, yes?”

“Secrets Taken to the Grave, yeah.”

“Think carefully. Did the Librarian give you anything to eat? Or drink?”

“Uh…” Quentin frowns. “Um, he gave me cocoa, I think? But I didn’t end up trying it.”

Eliot stands, collects Quentin’s untouched tea, and dumps it outside.

“Do me a favor,” he says, coming back inside to Quentin’s confused frown. “Don’t eat or drink anything.”

“Uh...O...kay? Why?”

“I have a theory, that’s all. Pomegranates, and all that. This _is_ Hades we’re dealing with.”

“You’re saying I...won’t be staying?”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.” Eliot looks at him severely enough that Quentin actually shrinks into his seat, which makes him soften.The Quentin that he grew old with would have come back with _the_ brattiest face, but the Quentin he grew old with wasn’t worn down enough to die in his twenties. “I know myself by now, Quentin, and I may not know the details, but there’s no way that boy down there isn’t ripping the world apart to find you.”

Quentin looks down at his hands.

“What?”

“Nothing—just. I don’t know. It’s—I’m like, _dead_ dead, Eliot. My body’s like, literal dust in a pocket dimension. They had a funeral and everything. What could any of them even _do_?”

Eliot feels a bit sick. He didn’t even know he was capable of that here. He swallows thickly. “I don’t know. But just. Humor me. Don’t eat or drink anything.”

“Yes, _Dad_ ,” Quentin grumbles, and Eliot just catches the eyeroll that he’d gotten to see in double when Teddy became a teenager.

“Watch that attitude, young man,” Eliot teases, though not quite at ease yet. He takes a long drink of tea, and lets the warmth of it spread through him. All metaphorical, obviously, but...his whole life had been devoted to a pretty metaphor. Might as well embrace it.

Quentin snorts at him, and there’s a comfortable silence as Eliot finishes his tea. 

“This...isn’t the house we had, right?” Quentin pipes up eventually, voice soft. “It looks different.”

“I made some improvements,” Eliot replies.

Quentin chuckles. “Yeah, you would.”

Eliot warms further. This may not be his husband, not really, but this Quentin still _knows_ him. It makes him feel seen, and so...fucking _incredibly_ sad. He busies himself at the counter, putting away the herbs and kettle. He could just wave them away with a thought, but much like he never let his telekinesis do too much work for him in life, he finds he still enjoys doing things with his hands as much as with magic.

~*~

The next few days are peaceful. Eliot still won’t let Quentin eat or drink anything, but they do garden together. Eliot tells Quentin stories from their life, little moments he may have forgotten, and Quentin tells him more about his own life after not walking into Fillory—a boat quest, dragon eggs, and Josh becoming a fish? Their lives were so fucking exhausting.

He also learns that Ted had finally died of brain cancer when magic returned, while Eliot was possessed. It makes Eliot feel sick with guilt that he couldn’t be there for him, that during all that was going on Quentin still had to do something as mundane and heartbreaking as burying his father.

The day after Quentin’s arrival, Arielle comes to visit. She laughs and embraces him, and Quentin takes it with grace, smiling and kissing her hello, but the minute her back is turned, his face falls. 

It’s not long before she clocks that something’s up, and upon receiving an explanation of the situation, lays into Quentin with a fury Eliot hasn’t seen since their son, at five, fell out of a tree after being told not to climb it. Quentin sits on the garden bench like a scolded child, head down as he takes this verbal lashing, but Eliot can just see the appearance of a dimple on his left cheek. 

If anything else, this young verison Quentin knows that he’s loved.

~*~

“Hey,” Quentin says, as he finishes packing the ground over the final seed of the row they’d spent the day planting. “You know Tenora had twins?”

Eliot turns to look at him from where he’s hanging herbs to dry. “ _Our_ little Nora? Who swore to Teddy she would go dragon slaying instead of marrying?”

“Yeah, she uh. Met a guy. While dragon slaying.” Quentin dimples up at him from where he squats on the ground. “I can’t always recall details, but I remember she came back to Teddy’s house pregnant when I was living there, after. Y’know. But yeah, she had a girl and a boy—Fiona and Eliot.”

Eliot finds himself all choked up. Ridiculous. “Oh.”

“I’m—I know you said not to be, but I really am sorry I’m not him. But I have his memories, kind of, and I’m getting some back the more we talk about it. If you wanted to ask anything.”

“Come here,” Eliot says, voice only shaking a little. Quentin comes, and Eliot wraps him up, chin on his head. “Don’t apologize for being who you are, okay? I won’t have it.” He feels Quentin sigh into his chest.

“We had a fucking—soccer team of great-grandkids by the end, El,” Quentin says, muffled. “You would’ve loved them. I used to do fireworks and coin tricks for them.”

Eliot pets his hair, picturing it. The twinkle Quentin would get in his eyes when he knew he was about to blow the mind of the nearest five-year-old. No one delighted in being an old man—in being a _grandfather_ —more than Quentin Coldwater. 

It isn’t fair. 

Which is a childish thought to have, but—well, it’s not. Quentin _deserved_ to grow old, and as far as Eliot was concerned up until recently, had gotten to do so. But he’d given that up, to ensure that Eliot and the rest of the world were safe from the thing that had been hurting him.

The feeling that’s been on a low simmer since Quentin’s arrival wells up again—it’s love, he knows, but it feels an awful lot like fury.

“El?”

“Sorry,” Eliot lets go, realizing he’d been silently squeezing Quentin to his chest a little too long to be comfortable. “I think...I think I’m angry at you,” he says gently, cupping Quentin’s cheek in his palm.

Quentin looks up at him with concerned eyebrows.

Eliot runs the pad of his thumb over one of them. “I want to tell you to—don’t do it again.” He laughs ruefully at himself. “As if that will change anything. But you deserved to keep living, baby. You deserved another fifty-plus years, whether it was with me or not. And I’ll be—fucking furious, forever probably, that you didn’t.”

He watches Quentin’s jaw tighten before he lays his head back on Eliot’s chest.

And the thing is—the thing is, is that it’s not _just_ that he’s angry for Quentin, for the young man he’s holding and the life he didn’t get to live.

Eliot also just. He fucking wants his old man back. He wants to talk to the sweet old geezer who became great-grandfather to a baby named after Eliot. Quentin may have his memories, but there’s still a disconnect there. Even if he is able to send Quentin back to Earth one day, there’s no guarantee now that the Quentin Eliot knows will come to take his place.

This isn’t his husband. And even with everything else aside, Eliot is, in the end, a selfish man. And it breaks his heart.

“You miss him, though,” Quentin says into Eliot’s collarbone. “That’s part of it too, isn’t it?”

“God,” Eliot breathes. “I do. I’m sorry, I do. And I don’t—” he swallows. “I don’t even know if he’s coming anymore.”

Quentin tilts his head up, stands on his toes, takes Eliot’s face in his hands and blindsides him with a gentle kiss. 

“He will,” Quentin says as he settles back on his heels, face set with determination. “I promise, okay? I have—an idea. I think. Wait here. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll. I’ll be right back, then.”

And with that, he runs off into the woods from which he emerged some days ago.

Eliot stands stunned for a moment before trying to follow. The woods unnerve him—metaphorical as they are, they seem to be some sort of in-between space. The “neighborhood” is connected by a network of paths, but Quentin has barged straight into the trees. Eliot can only go a few steps in before the unease overwhelms him—he wonders why Quentin doesn’t feel it himself.

Quentin’s hoodie disappears into the trees, and Eliot elects to trust him and wait. 

His husband has always been a fixer. With...varying levels of success, obviously. But Eliot has seen that resolute expression on him before, and there would be no talking him out of it.

And if it didn’t work, he’d be right back.

Eliot goes back to his gardening for a little while, but after fifteen, twenty minutes, Eliot can’t take the silence, the not-knowing. He gets up again, and edges up to the start of the woods.

“Q?” he calls. “Where’d you get to?”

He’s about to call again, take a step or two in, when there’s a rustling, and then a figure approaching.

A familiar one.

Eliot backs up, and an old man, with a ridiculous beard and brown eyes ringed with laugh lines exits the trees, smiling.

“Q?” Eliot breathes, not daring to hope—had this younger Quentin just been hiding out in the trees, figuring out how to look older for him?

“Hey, sweetheart,” says the old man, arms opening.

Eliot sobs, and runs to him.

~*~

Here we see young Quentin, running into the between-spaces of the Beyond, with a plan. When he reaches a familiar clearing, he takes the Metrocard out of his hoodie pocket. On the back, like any Metrocard, is a lot of fine print.

There’s been a terrible mix-up with his route, and Quentin needs to call customer service.

Hades steps into the clearing, and Quentin presents his case.

“Funny you should call now,” Hades says. “Quite a few of us have come to the same conclusion. You haven't eaten anything here, have you?"

Quentin shakes his head.

"Wait here.” A door opens, Hades walks into it, and moments later, a smiling old man emerges.

~*~

Here we see Eliot, his husband returned to him, holding his face in his hands. The old man has become a middle-aged one to match Eliot, clean-shaven, with his long honey-brown hair tied back in a messy ponytail.

“What, no more beard?” Eliot asks around his tears, brushing his knuckles along Quentin’s smooth jaw.

“Yeah, thought I’d clean up for the occasion.”

“I liked the beard.”

Quentin laughs, “You fucking liar,” and kisses him. “That’s probably the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

Eliot gently yanks at the ponytail. “Asshole,” he grouches, and presses their foreheads together. “If it’s sweet talking you’re looking for, I’ll _give_ you a sweet talking, old man. See if I won’t!”

~*~

On Earth, somewhere in Upstate New York, in the common room of the Physical Magic cottage at Brakebills, three grieving friends are holding hands, and open their eyes to find they are joined by someone they thought they’d lost.

Quentin greets them sheepishly, and is practically smothered by all three going to hug him at once. He lets himself be consumed by them, and becomes one with a laughing and crying pile of people he loves. 

Who love him.

When the excitement dies down, and everyone stands as Julia passes around a box of tissues, Quentin and Eliot lock eyes.

Quentin steps closer, and closer, and looks up. Eliot’s eyes are red and wet, and he looks like he wants to smile, but can’t quite figure out how. Like he’s afraid to, too amazed by what he sees.

Quentin waits.

Whatever was holding Eliot back crumbles, and he takes Quentin by the arms and kisses him, firmly, decisively. 

The hands at Quentin’s elbows are shaking.

The kiss breaks slowly, and Quentin opens his eyes to see tears on Eliot’s cheeks again. 

“Hey…” Quentin whispers, reaching up for Eliot’s face.

“Q, I’m so, I’m sorr—”

Quentin quiets him with another kiss, gentler this time. Eliot makes a small sound, a shuddering breath, and pulls him close.

With two rings tucked away in his pocket, Quentin thinks of the old man who gave them to him, of how that old man's husband had picked him up and spun him around in welcome, and had yelled at him for being careless with himself. He finds himself looking forward to all of that. And more.

~*~

And In a world beyond the Underworld, where two old men with young faces, laughing and holding onto each other, make their way across a garden to their home, a small sprout emerges from the dirt, where two pairs of hands had planted it.

_In a country house with the windows lit by burning wicks_   
_And the walls held up by wood and bricks_ _  
And the ghosts that wander through_

**Author's Note:**

> The title of the story is from Jeremiah 29:28, KJV (the same book and chapter that the other story's title is from): "This captivity is long: build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them."
> 
> Keeping with the theme, the title of the series this is now part of is from Delta Rae's song "Dance in the Graveyards", and the quotes before and after are from their song "Country House".


End file.
